The father in Hayden's poem made many sacrifices for his family. The first sacrifice is seen in the poem's first line, "Sundays too my father got up early" (10). This shows that the father got up early on his only day off to get the house warm for his family. The word "too" from the first line tells the reader that the father got up early every other day of the week for work. The next sacrifice the father makes is that not only does he get up early he gets up in the cold, " [the father] put his clothes on in the blueblack cold" (10). Getting up early his a hard thing in

Getting up in the cold is hard enough, but then trying to function and move around is even harder, " and slowly I would rise and dress" (10). After getting out of bed the body does not want to move at all. Your body is used to the warm bed and the blood is not fully pumping. After reading that line you have to give credit to the father. If the boy was moving slowly and miserably after getting up even when the house was warm, imagine what the father had to go through. I could never do what the father did. If I was the boy I wouldn't think of it as a great achievement, but the way that Hayden uses all the images I realize and the speaker now realizes that it was a more than a great achievement, it was love. Knowing this the father in the poem could be considered a hero.

itself, but getting up and knowing that you could be sleeping in a warm bed is worse. Instead of sleeping in his warm bed the father gets up and works in "the blueblack cold" (10). The "blueblack" is the color of the sky on a freezing winter morning and is not a pleasant sight if you have to be up and about in it. Another sacrifice that the father makes is that he does manual labor in the cold all week, "...with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze" (10). The image of the "cracked hands" is a sacrifice enough, never mind how they got cracked. The hands, most likely, are cracked form working outside with his bare hands. The father maybe worked construction or some other hard manual labor job and did these jobs so that he can make money to support his family. shows how the father did everything he could to make his family happy. The fathe

Some common words found in the essay are:
Winter Sundays, house warm, winter morning, Growing England, warm house, warm bed, Robert Hayden's, cracked hands, father family, bed father, sacrifices family, cold winter morning, warm bed father, sacrifice father makes, sleeping warm bed, simple words, laying bed, warm house warm,
Approximate Word count = 1131
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)